Who is the best interpreter? Not learned men surely.
Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it.
It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in
their lives and sayings. When all the most learned
commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the
accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide
and be an inspiration for ages to come.1
The grim fact is that the terrorists have in absolute
honesty, earnestness and with cogency used the Gita,
which some of them know by heart, in defense of their
doctrine and policy. Only they have no answer to my
interpretation of the Gita, except to say that mine
is wrong and theirs is right. Time alone will show whose is
right. The Gitais not a theoretical treatise. It
is a living but silent guide whose directions one has to
understand by patient striving.2
Writing about Gandhi has become increasingly difficult in
our times, since the sheer weight of critical scholarship
on Gandhi-- some of which seeks to explore the finer and
subtler aspects of his relationship with modernity,
colonisation, nationalism and sexuality-- is very daunting
indeed!3. In any event, however, I would venture
to explore in this paper the relatively unexplored
dimensions of both Gandhi the man and Gandhian discourse,
through a close reading of the three key terms: Swaraj/Swadeshi/and
Satyagraha which are bound together by the common and
most fundamental thematic of Satya and a commitment
to search for the truth. What comes out of the close
reading is the realisation that both Gandhian theory and
practice take us far ahead of the problematic of both
modernity and nationalism, into a domain called
experiential politics and/or experiential knowledge whose
full range of meanings, and ethical force, we have yet to
acknowledge and ascertain.
Let us begin by examining two very simple statements of
Gandhi made well before the political independence. He
said: "We must become the change that we wish to see in the
(external) world" 4 This is a very loaded
statement. We cannot wish it away by subjecting this
statement to any kind of historicist, psychological,
symbolic or discourse analysis. It remains there like a
mirror before us, staring in the face of all our activist or
scholarly zeal to transform the world we live in. The
implications of this statement are very far reaching, but
suffice it to say here that the statement exhorts us to pay
attention to the primacy of the self over 'the
world'; or in other words, the ethical and subjective
dimension of the self over an objective and empiricist
self-description, or analysis of the world. The second
statement is even more startling in its cognitive and
ethical depth. Gandhi wrote in The Hind Swaraj (1909)
: 'The English have not taken India; we have given it to
them. They are not in India because of their strength, but
because we keep them.’ 5 Startling indeed as it
will sound to a modern and nationalist sensibility,
Gandhi was absolutely sure of what he wrote in The Hind
Swaraj as far back as 1909, and was unwilling to
change even a single word in that very provocative
historical document. Taken together, these two statements
point to a very urgent need for the re-structuring of
'the self' and a radical dismantling of our cognitive,
ethical and moral priorities before we may expect a
meaningful transformation of the social and political world
at large. The enemy, therefore, is not only lurking within
us; it is indeed an intimate part of our self-definition in
terms of scientific and secular progress. This 'enemy' is
identified in The Hind Swaraj as 'modern Western
Civilization'. It is significant to stress the qualifier
'modern' with all its affiliation and implications,
suggesting thereby the initiation of a world view as well as
a political process which began with the European
Renaissance in the West. Gandhi’s fundamental opposition
and struggle, therefore, is neither with the West as such,
nor with the British people and government, as was the case
with several Indian Nationalists of different dispensation.
Gandhi's problematic lay in fact well outside the bounds of
post-enlightment apparatus of rationality and its vision of
history, science, masculinity and progress which was largely
internalised by cultural nationality and social
reformers of the late Nineteenth century India who argued
largely in favour of 'modernising' India by reviving its
past glory of the Vedic ages through purification and
revival of classical Sanskrit learning. 6 Gandhi
emerges as a purely maverick figure on the Indian national
scene who remains, quite paradoxically, outside the
theoretical formulation of the modern nation-state and
its vision In fact, on the contrary, he argues for the
dissolution of the nation-state in favour of
enlightened anarchy while still leading the national
liberation movement in India to its success in 1947!. This
argument can be developed further by a critical elaboration
of three key terms taken from the Gandhian lexicon, namely
Swadeshi, Swaraj and Satyagraha which are
bound together by the common commitment to the search for
truth.

Swaraj

The term 'Swaraj' in Gandhian lexicon straddles two
different locations, the inner and the outer, beginning from
the rule over oneself, to a republic of local
self-government with absolutely radical form of
self-regulatory and participatory democracy. For Gandhi,
however, the first meaning or the inner dimension of
Swaraj, that is, rule over oneself, is not only the vital
component; it is a pre-requisite to the outer or
institutional arrangements of Swaraj. The inner dimension
lay in taking up an active and honest exploration into
truth, or one's own true nature, or a mode of self-inquiry
leading to the state of experiential knowledge. As Gandhi
expresses it:
Devotion to this truth is the sole justification
for our existence. All our activities should be the
very breath of our being. When once this state in the
pilgrim’s progress is reached all other rules of correct
living will come without effort and obedience to
them will be instructive... To a man who has
realised this truth in its fullness, nothing else remains to
be known because all knowledge is necessarily included in
it ...7
Swaraj, then, can arise only with the removal
of cognitive and ethical enslavement brought
about by forces far deeper than mere repressive policies of
the British government. In the most fundamental sense
Swaraj can arise by a radical re-structuring of the
constitutive elements of the self thus spontaneously and
naturally leading to the restoration of a world-view
as well as an epistemology founded on experiential
knowledge that were not encumbered by modern western
civilisation. Thus Gandhi's vision of Swaraj is pitched at
a level far beyond the constitutional, social or
political. He does not accept the argument that effective
combinations are formed among individuals and groups
sharing self-interests, and that institutions of
representative democracy will ensure that the government
will act in ways, which are, on the whole, in the common
interest of the entire collectivity. Besides, for Gandhi,
the legal fiction of equality before the law and the
supposed neutrality of state institutions only have the
effect of perpetuating the inequalities and divisions
which already exist in society. Politics has no role
in removing those inequalities or cementing the divisions.
In fact, this very process of law and politics creates a
'vested interest' among politicians, state officials, and
'legal practitioners' to perpetuate social divisions, and
indeed to create new ones.
By contrast, it is only when politics is
directly subordinated to a communal morality that the
minority of exploiters in society can be isolated by the
people and inequalities and divisions removed. As a
political leader, therefore, 'Gandhi counterposes against
the system of representativegovernment an undivided
concept of popular sovereignty, where the community
is self-regulating and political power is dissolved into the
collective moral will. In Gandhi’s own words:
‘The power to control national life through
national representatives is called political power.
Representatives will become unnecessary if the
national life becomes so perfect as to be self-controlled.
It will then be a state of enlightened anarchy in
which each person will become his own ruler. He will
conduct himself in such a way that his behavior will not
hamper the well being of his neighbours. In an
ideal state there will be no political institution and
therefore no political power.’8

Swadeshi

In Gandhian deployment of the term Swadeshi
we discover a deep antagonism to not only foreign goods or
foreign consumer products, a phenomenon which is all too
well known, but also simultaneously, a deep distrust and
hence outright rejection of all foreign institutional
methods of governance and politics. When Gandhi comments
on modern western civilisation’s violent and enslaving
effect on its own people, as well as on the Indian
culture, he envisions a world which is free of the
inhibiting and dominating frameworks of modern governance
and politics everywhere. Significantly then,
Swadeshi is not a form of parochialism, or geographical
landscape, as one's village. It is rather a universal
state of mind and being, unencumbered by the world-view
pioneered by Newtonian Science, and Lockean politics of
state, where the state is neither the final arbiter
between individuals or groups, nor is it the giver of any
value or largesse. Seen in this light
Gandhian conception of Swadeshi politics marks a radical
departure from both the liberal, as well as socialist and
Marxian conception of politics. More generally, we can
characterise the liberal conception of politics as an
activity that uses the state to advance its objectives, be
it solving social problems or legislating new laws or
re-designing institutions, whereas in the Gandhian
conception of politics it is community based, collective and
shared ethos and values that will determine the role of the
state, if any. Gandhian stress on Swadeshi thus
arises from a total rejection of the norms
that are set up by and come through modern law, religion
medicine, politics and history, all of which serve to
occlude, rather than deepen, the kind of knowledge directed
toward the search for Truth. Gandhi seems to have achieved
this insight from a variety of traditional sources,
including traditional Christianity, Syncretistic Hinduism,
Jainism, popular Islam and the thought of Tolstoy and
Thoreau, all of which he fused into his unique style and
symbolism that deserves special attention and
understanding.
It is the uniquely symbolic style of Gandhian 'Swadeshi' as
a form of 'cultural power' which has largely escaped
attention from contemporary social sciences, based as they
are on tools of analysis that are themselves derived, in one
way or another, from the classical natural sciences and
their accompanying varieties of logic. Indeed one might as
well submit that a stubbornly 'rational inquiry' which tends
often to reduce culture to a set of objective linguistic
propositions or worse still, to different ideological forms
of politics, has all too often missed the point about
'Swadeshi' and its ability to fashion weapons of political
struggle out of unorthodox material. Gandhi's politics were
formed out of an irreducible combination of cultural and
political components of his philosophy in which what you
do and the way you do it are inextricably mixed.
Resolved into its parts, it appeared laughable and
simplistic, but as a totality it was after all the only form
of power which not only put the British on the wrong foot,
but also posed the most fundamental challenge to British
rule in cultural and civilisational terms.9 The
source materials out of which this symbolic machinery was
drawn, and the elaborate theatre of simplicity, the
Charkha , Khadi and the local herbs as medicine were ,
as already mentioned, belonged to popular and syncretistic
elements of both Hinduism and traditional Islam in India,
constituting together a culture of great inflections
containing an enormous repertoire of gestures symbolizing
action from insults to defiance. Seen in the light of
Gandhian style of 'Swadeshi' politics was neither
obscurantist, nor impotent, as most of the contemporary
social science had mistakenly believed. Rather it was a
subtly indigenous cultural style which does not justify
itself in terms of the other but effects a breaking down
of the barrier between the political interlocutor and his
audience. The net result of this was that Gandhi uniquely
succeeded in fashioning a pre-discursive play on
symbols and gestures which already said a great
deal to an audience before the actual speaking began. The
elaborate theatre of simplicity was not a matter of personal
idiosyncrasy; they constituted small but wholly credible
everyday gesture of belonging, which formed in their
totality a deeply anti-colonial political act in cognitive
as well as cultural terms. It did through a personal
symbolic style what a purely rationalist discourse could
never aspire to achieve both cognitively and politically.
Hence, the need for a much greater appreciation of
'Swadeshi' in contemporary Indian politics!

Satyagraha

Gandhi's relentless pursuit of Truth (Sat) implied a
concrete, if unconditional, confidence in every person far
surpassing the negative and suspicious thinking of several
systems of thought and ideologies by violent confrontation
on the turf of manliness and logic of progress. He could
honestly call himself a 'sociologist' and a ‘communist’
though his reading of Indian culture and religion, and his
uniquely fashioned style of symbolic politics, urged him to
reject many of their fundamental assumptions, methods and
perspectives. Towards the end of his life-odyssey, he
enshrined the essence of that timeless aspiration in a
single statement, as he said:
I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt or
when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following
test. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom
you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you
contemplate in going to be of any use to him. Will he gain
anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his
own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to
Swaraj for the hungry and spiritually starving million?
Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away.10
The term 'Satyagraha' has an interesting origin, when
Gandhi began his movement in South Africa; he first used the
term 'passive resistance'. As the struggle advanced Gandhi
found 'passive resistance' to be inadequate to express the
substance of his movement. It also appeared to him
'shameful' that the Indian struggle should be known by an
English name. A small prize was announced, therefore, in
the journal Indian Opinion to be
awarded to the reader who invented the best designation for
the new struggle. Maganlal Gandhi suggested the word
Sadagraha meaning ‘firmness in a good
cause'. Gandhi liked the world but as it did not carry the
full import of his idea, he changed it to Satyagraha,
‘the force which is born of truth and love with total
non-violence' 11
Etymologically the Sanskrit word Satyagraha is made up of
root word Sat and Agraha combining to form an
expression implying Active Resistance to Injustice, where
the power of resistance is derived from the relentless
pursuit of Sat while engaged in a state of mind which
is absolutely fearless, and is willing to stake one's all
including one’s job, family, reputation, security, and life
itself, for the sake of truth. Therefore, it would be a
gross error to interpret Satyagraha as a
self-indulgent political tactic or strategy to
achieve a narrow or selfish goal. After the death of
Gandhi, or even during his lifetime some groups of people
might have used the term 'Satyagraha' in order to
achieve a short term goal; but this degeneration into a
strategy or tactic can by no means be equated with the
Gandhian weapon of struggle, as he had conceived of it.
Similarly, the phrase non-cooperation, or civil
disobedience, though often in use in modern political and
social theory, also falls short of the hermeneutic load
carried by the original Sanskrit Satyagraha. That
is because the experiential domain of Satyagraha
which truly belongs to the realm of spirituality, as a
way of self-inquiry, or as in Gandhian parlance, an
experiment with experiential truth, can not be adequately
translated into the lexicon of a secularized world-view.
The intranslatability arises from the direct
incompatibility of two opposite worlds: the spiritual and
the secular. Little wonder that the chief architect of
modern Indian nation-state, Jawaharlal Nehru, found it so
exasperating to see Gandhian philosophy of life in action;
particularly the application and withdrawal of Satyagraha at
will on many occasions! For Nehru, as for several others
like him in the Indian National Congress, the
re-enchantment of the secular world was as
obscurantist as was indeed the fundamental and necessary
experiential condition of Satyagraha for the
emergence of true meaning of Swaraj
Gandhi explicitly said that for him Bhagavad Gita was
the most inspirational text in his fashioning of Satyagraha
as a weapon of political struggle against the injustice
of the British Raj12. Here he found a perfect
theory of action which is intention less and
therefore beyond good and evil in the ordinary sense of the
term. Action of a true Satyagrahi, therefore, is
action without mental conception of good and evil,
reward or punishment, because it arises from an
experiential domain of Sat which has no objectual
orinformational dimension per se but can
neverthelessallow or enable one to use objects for
executing actions. This enables us to understand the
marvelous sense of integration that Gandhi brings to a whole
range of very disparate objects, events and phenomena:
family, economy, politics, ethics and the natural world,
which flows effortlessly from this unity of reflection and
action. The social for Gandhi is then imbued with action
and experience of a true Satyagrahi, the State of
mind of a Sthitpragyan,as he discoveredit in the Bhagwavad Gita.
He could therefore declare unequivocally:
It is a charge against India that her people are so
uncivilised, ignorant and stolid, that it is not possible to
induce them to adopt any changes. It is a charge really
against our merit. What we have tested and found true on
the anvil of experience, we dare not change.13
It has been fashionable in the political left for quite some
time to associate Gandhi with the forces of reaction, even
if he is given credit for some mysterious and magical
capabilities through which he could feel and trigger the
pulse of Indian masses. Discussed largely as a clever
strategist and a shrewd baniya political tactician,
it is alleged that Gandhi allowed himself to be appropriated
by the bourgeoisie middle classes and its nationalist press
who in turn took full advantage of his mysterious
capabilities of launching a mass revolution against the
British Raj.14 Thus the middle class "passive
revolution" of India can be characterised as
a nationalist momentof manoeuvre whereby
the masses of Indian peasantry and artisan classes were
drawn into the charmed circle of Gandhian Satyagraha
mass movement, only to be disappointed and let down at the
realisation of political independence 15. This
accusation against the Gandhian method, or worse still,
historical understanding of the phenomenon of
Satyagraha, even when leveled with all
seriousness and scholarly zeal, is deeply flawed and
misplaced, because it arises from a lack of fundamental
awareness of the constitutive elements of Satgyagraha
leading to Gandhian notion of Swaraj . Satyagraha,
in fact, is no politics at all in the usual sense of the
term. It has no explicit political objective to be
achieved.

Epilogue:

After a consideration of the three key-words from Gandhian
lexicon, namely Swaraj, Swadeshi and
Satyagraha, one is obliged to ask: what to make of
Gandhi today? Is his model of Swaraj and the method
to obtain it; are parts of a glorious relic or heritage we
may choose to admire with awe and wonderment from a distant
horizon? Perhaps, one may all too readily put on one's
pragmatic hat and announce that it is not modernity or
modern civilisation per se that may be
rejected but the state of mind and the society that it
engenders. Further, it is not technology or the civil
society per se but the wrong uses of both
technology and civil society that must be rejected.
However, Gandhi’s own position on these matters is
absolutely clear. When asked twenty five years later after
the writing of Hind Swaraj whether he would like to
change anything in that book his reply was an emphatic no.
He remained all along fully convinced that evil tendencies
are inherently etched and deeply embedded in modern
civilisation; its political structure, civil society, and
technology. It is not as if one could separate
modern civilisation from its evil effects, and use it as a
neutral tool for all round growth and prosperity.
The task before the cultural critic today once again, is to
meditate over that Gandhian claim.

See, for instances, Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist thought and the colonial world (Delhi: O.U.P.,
1986); Vivek Dhareshwar, "Policies, experience and cognitive enslavement: Gandhi’s HindSwaraj,
Economic and Political weekly, March 20, 2010; Akeel Bilgrami, "Gandhi, the Philosopher", EPW
(27 Sept 2003); and S.H. Rudolph, Post Modern Gandhi and Other Essays (O.U.P. 2006) as examples of new
scholarship on the Gandhian phenomenon.

CW, Vol. 69, p.72

Hind Swaraj, CW , Vol. 10. pp.22-23

For a full elaboration of the statement see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: O.U.P, 1983). Nandy's
insightful analysis shows that most pre-Gandhian reform and protest movements ended up legitimizing
the very model of masculinity (derived from protestant Christianity and Vedic Hinduism) those they sought to
resist, because they accepted, rather than altered, the terms of colonial discourse. Gandhian intervention,
however, undermined the civilisational and cultural basis of imperialist hyper-masculinity by delinking courage and
activism from aggression and hyper-rationality, and making them compatible with certain form of femininity,
traditional Christianity and syncretistic forms of composite Hinduism.

Harijan, Sept. 7, 1935. It is necessary to recall here that Gandhi is not aiming to realise truth in the
sense in which it came to be used in the Renaissance model of science and colonial logic of progress, leading to
'the survival of the fittest'. Truth, for Gandhi, is not a linguistic proposition which can be verified and tested in
the laboratory through empiricist methods of experimentation. Truth is thus beyond the enlightment
ideal of rationality, not due to it, or because of it. Truth is rather a form of experiential knowledge,
unmediated by thought and tools of language. For explorations into a new-science approach to truth, see
Ravi Ravindra, Science and the Sacred (Madras: Theosophical Society, 2000).

"Enlightened Anarchy - A Political Ideal" in Sarvodaya, Jan, 1939.

For a comprehensive argument on 'symbolism' of Gandhi see, Sudipta Kaviraj, 'The Heteronymous Discourse of M.N.
Roy' in Political Thought in Modern India, ed. by Thomas Pantham and K. L. Deutsch (Sage: N. Delhi, 1986)

"At the present moment, though I am reading many things, Bhagvad Gita is becoming more and more the
only infallible guide, the only dictionary of reference, in which I find all the sorrows... with exquisite
solutions... And if it is a record of anybody's experience, it must not be beyond us to be able to
test the truth of it by repeating the experience. I am testing the truth almost every day in my life and find it
never failing... CW, Vol. 39, p. 450.

Leftist and Post-modernist scholarship on Gandhi, though very subtle and astute as, for example, illustrated
by the works of Subaltern Studies Collective in its early phase led by Ranajit Guha, has still not
considered constitutive spiritual dimensions of Satyagraha, and therefore, is unable to grasp the ethical
significance of this term. Similarly, Partha Chaterjee's essay on Ramakrishna remains woefully inadequate as he tries
to explain the impact of the phenomenon of Ramakrishna in terms of the "middle ness of the
middle class" of Bengal. See Partha Chatterjee, 'The Moment of Manoeuvre', Nationalist Thought and the
Colonial World (Delhi: O.U.P., 1986) and for his essay on Ramakrishna, The Nation and its
Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993)

* Mukesh Srivastava is Professor of English and Media Law at
the National Law University, Bhopal, where he is also the chairperson of the centre for Law Language and Culture. His
most recent work involves studies in consciousness and critical Humanities.